Andalusia

Andalusia is the historic home where American author Flannery O'Connor lived from 1951 until her death from lupus in 1964. This is where she was living when she completed her two novels and two collections of short stories. Andalusia is open to the public Thursday through Sunday from 10am to 5pm. For more information, call 478-454-4029.
Blog contributors include Executive Director, Elizabeth Wylie, and a variety of scholars and authors. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect the opinions of Andalusia Farm.

Gordon
wrote to O’Connor from Princeton, Minneapolis, Paris, Rome, and Seattle.

O’Connor
wrote to Gordon from Andalusia.

Gordon’s
first letter to O’Connor was written in 1951; Gordon didn’t visit O’Connor at
Andalusia for eight more years. By then, they had exchanged over 48,000 words
of correspondence.

In
October, 1959, Gordon arrived in Milledgeville with Ashley Brown.

Flannery
O’Connor’s mother, Regina, clashed with Caroline Gordon. While out on a drive with
Regina at the wheel, Gordon saw a dog that (she believed) needed rescue. Gordon
wanted to bring the creature safely to Andalusia. Regina refused to stop. Later,
Gordon convinced Ashley Brown to go back out and search for the dog. The dog, Gordon
said, could remain in Brown’s car overnight if Regina didn’t want the dog at
Andalusia. (Regina didn’t!) Brown humored Gordon. They searched. But he was
relieved when they could not find the dog, and he told Regina he would not have allowed the dog to stay in his
car. Later, in a conversation about farm business, Gordon and Regina disagreed
about artificial insemination. Gordon, the Catholic convert, opposed it as
unnatural; Regina, quite pragmatically, felt otherwise.2On
Sunday, Gordon gave Flannery O’Connor feedback on her final draft of The Violent Bear it Away—“several hours lecture on my prose,”
said O’Connor. “I have just corrected the page proofs and I spent a lot of time
getting seems and as-if constructions out of it. It was
like getting ticks off a dog. I was blissfully unaware of all this while I was
writing it.”3Gordon and Brown departed. Regina told Flannery that she
understood why that man (Allen Tate, Gordon’s husband) would want to divorce Gordon.

Despite Gordon’s strong personality, Flannery fully grasped the
value of these critiques. To a friend, O’Connor said of Gordon’s comments: “It
would have done your heart good to see all the marks on the copy, everything
commented upon, doodles, exclamation points, cheers, growls. You can know that
she enjoys reading it and reads every word.”

Gordon next descended on Andalusia in September, 1960.

Writing to Lon and Fanny Cheney, O’Connor said, “I had a call from Mrs. Gordon Tate Herself from Princeton
saying her aunt in Chattanooga had summoned her and she would like to come see
us on her way back. She said she would come on the following Tuesday but
arrived instead on Monday. She stayed until Wednesday and we haven’t heard from
her since she left. However, the people over at Wesleyan are having one of
those Arts Festivals that no college can now do without and have invited her to
be on the panel (me too) and she wrote the man she would come down as she would
be glad to continue her visit with us. So it appears we are to be honored
again.”5The October, 1960, Wesleyan Arts Festival featured O’Connor and Gordon
alongside Katherine Anne Porter and Madison Jones, all “paid (well) to swap
clichés about Southern culture.”6

After the conference, Gordon and Porter planned to visit
Andalusia. O’Connor predicted (with her usual dry humor) that the occasion
would be something to see: “According to Ashley
[Brown], these two have not confronted each other for fifteen years.”7

The
highlight of the weekend, however, was when “Katherine
Anne remembered to inquire about a chicken of mine that she had met here two
years before,” said O’Connor. “I call that really having a talent for winning
friends and influencing people.”8

Meanwhile, Caroline Gordon read a draft of A Memoir of Mary Anne and, after admiring it, urged O’Connor to
find a secular publisher.9

Gordon’s next Andalusia
visit was the following year in July, 1961.

O’Connor was working on “The Lame Shall Enter First.” Gordon’s
feedback was characteristically blunt. The story wasn’t dramatic enough, Gordon
said. O’Connor was writing too many essays and it was affecting her style.

O’Connor acknowledged that Gordon was correct in her analysis. And
there were “a million other things that I could have seen myself if I had had
the energy,” O’Connor said. “So much of my trouble is laziness, not physical
laziness so much as mental, not taking the trouble to think how a thing ought
to be dramatized.”10

After the visit, O’Connor said, “Ashley and Caroline were
strenuous, as usual.”1

Among Gordon’s circle of friends, O’Connor
was one who knew of Gordon’s painful personal struggles. When one person
harshly criticized Gordon, O’Connor outlined the details of Gordon’s struggles
and insisted: Pray for her.12

During
the July, 1961 visit, O’Connor noted that Gordon had stopped drinking—not even
a glass of sherry. O’Connor thought that Gordon (divorced now) seemed much
improved.13

That would be Gordon’s last visit to
Andalusia.

It
remains noteworthy that Gordon’s earliest critiques of O’Connor’s work (in
1951-52) coincided with O’Connor’s move to a new home, Andalusia. A landscape
of sprawling pastures circled by jagged pines. From her first letter to her
last, Gordon told the young writer to expand her use of landscape and nature,
to enlarge her fictional settings and reflect O’Connor’s Christian vision of an
eternal God.

Year after year at Andalusia, Flannery
O’Connor would place Caroline Gordon’s letters to the side—then get back to
work.

Christine Flanagan, MFA, is an Associate
Professor of English at University of the Sciences in Philadelphia.

Friday, June 17, 2016

There were few things that the young Flannery O’Connor feared more in
this life than living in Georgia for the rest of her days. She
elaborated on these fears in a biographical sketch she wrote as a
master’s student at the University of Iowa. Her education in
Milledgeville, she feared, had prepared her for one thing only: to teach
English to ninth-graders in Podunk, Georgia, for $87.50 a month. Her
words, not mine.

But of course Flannery O’Connor did come home
to Georgia for the rest of her life, and the story of her homecoming is
one of the most significant homecoming stories in the history of
American literature. As a child and student, O’Connor moved from Savanna
to Atlanta and then to Milledgeville. As an aspiring writer, she moved
first to Iowa City for the university’s writers workshop; then to the
Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs; from there to a walk-up
apartment in Manhattan; and from there to a room above a garage
in Redding, Connecticut; and then, finally, back to Milledgeville, to
the farm that would inspire much of her life’s work: Andalusia.

Each
of her life’s stops added a new aspect to her art: the grotesque, the
satirical, the tragic, and the graceful. These aspects would ultimately
converge at Andalusia, from whose porch and fields O’Connor witnessed
the whole world.

O’Connor developed her interest in the humorous,
bizarre, and grotesque as a child in Savannah, where she grew up
enjoying gruesome stories from Poe’s Humerous Tales and telling her own
tales to friends whilst seated, surrounded by sprinkled flowers, upon
the toilet in the family bathroom on the third floor of her house on
Lafayette Square (she required that her audience sit attentively in the
tub).

O’Connor honed her skills as a satirist and regionalist
after moving to the Cline family home on Greene Street in Milledgeville
to attend high school and college. At the experimental Peabody High
School, O’Connor’s individualism was nourished and she was encouraged to
do such things as sew clothes for her pet birds for class exercises.
O’Connor, not surprisingly, writes that she hated the school and wished
the place had forced her to learn the classics. In her many publications
at the Georgia State College for Women, O’Connor developed her skills
of regional observation and satire in cartoons, poems, essays, and
stories that lampooned her fellow students, Milledgeville’s gentility,
and, especially, the U.S Navy WAVES who had invaded the wartime campus.

O’Connor brought these formidable skills with her to the Iowa
Writer’s Workshop. Her fellow students—mostly men and veterans—were in
awe of the quiet little southern lady in the Georgia Bulldogs sweatshirt
who sat against the wall. O’Connor by then was already a published
author, and while at Iowa she sold two more stories and won the workshop’s Rinehart-Iowa prize for the first four chapters of Wise Blood.

This early work, though, is not the complete O’Connor package. A story
such as “The Crop,” for instance, possesses all of O’Connor’s satirical,
regionalist style but little else. In this story Miss Willerton sets
out to write a “social problem” novel focusing on the wretchedness of
the rural poor. She writes only three sentences before she stops writing
and gets lost in a daydream about her sharing a torrid life with her
abusive protagonist, Lot Motum. When she returns to those three
sentences, the problems of the rural poor no longer interest her. So she
decides to write a story about the problems of the Irish instead. Ba
dum.

“The Crop” is funny, but it lacks two essential components
of a true O’Connor tale: a classical, often tragic structure, which
O’Connor learned while living with the Fitzgeralds in Connecticut; and a
religious sensibility, which O’Connor would fully explore after her
return to Andalusia.

While working on Wise Blood in the attic at
the Fitzgerald’s house, O’Connor for the first time in her life felt
secure enough to express her religious views in her fiction. However,
like a medieval scholar, she needed the Greeks to help her communicate
those views. O’Connor figured out how to write the ending of Wise
Blood—a novel she had started a half-decade earlier and was struggling
to finish—from her host Robert Fitzgerald, a Harvard professor who was
translating Sophocles. O’Connor read Sophocles for the first time in
Connecticut, and when she read Oedipus she knew that Hazel Motes, too,
must blind himself. O’Connor uses the imagery of Greek mythology in
several of her stories, and she follows the arc of Greek tragedy, of proud people brought low, in many of her plots.

With the tragic gravity of the classics finally acquired, O’Connor
returned home for Christmas in 1950. Her lupus erupted during the train
ride, requiring emergency surgery. She would never leave home for an
extended period again.

It was at home at Andalusia that O’Connor
ultimately found the subjects for much of her mature fiction, in the
life of the family farm, her mother Regina, the local newspaper, even
the phone book. The Misfit is based on a real bank robber; General Sash
and his granddaughter are based on real people whom O’Connor thought
were ridiculous; the Displaced Person is based on a Polish refugee
family Regina invited to Andalusia; the bull in “Greenleaf” is based on
the neighbor’s bull; the boys in “A Circle in the Fire” are based on
runaways from the local juvenile boot camp; and so on….

O’Connor eventually recognized that her return to Andalusia was the
completion of her journey as an artist. She explains her sentiments in a
letter to her friend Maryat Lee: “This is a return I have faced and
when I faced it I was roped and tied and resigned the way it is
necessary to be resigned to death, and largely because I thought it
would be the end of any creation, any writing, any WORK from me. And as I
told you by the fence, it was only the beginning.”

When you
visit Andalusia, go to that fence (any will do) and follow its rails to a
point on the horizon. There you will discover where the routes of
O’Connor’s life’s journey converged, the many aspects of her artistry
became one, and her true work began.

Doug Davis is
professor English at Gordon State College in Barnesville, Georgia, a
short drive west from Andalusia. He is currently editing a special issue
of The Flannery O’Connor Review on the topic of science and technology
in O’Connor, which will be the subject of his next Andalusia blog post.

Friday, June 10, 2016

What an honor – I walk
the same streets as she did, study at the same college as she studied, and
subtly stare at the same types of people she stared at not too long ago. This
feeling is magical, though Flannery O’Connor might have made fun of me for
saying that. Living in Milledgeville, where O’Connor spent some of her most
productive days, is an adventure in itself. But studying O’Connor at her alma
mater, frequenting Andalusia, her beautiful and quaint family farm, and working
closely with her manuscripts is all part of a real adventure. When I was first
required to read Wise Blood in my senior year of high school, I hated
it. I had trouble understanding how the parts of the novel fit together. I
loved the language, specifically the Southern colloquialisms, but I wanted
clear answers after reading. I wanted to understand why O’Connor wrote in
detail about a mummy and a gorilla suit, and why there wasn’t much actual
blood. I loved the grotesque elements in the novel but I still wanted concrete
answers.

When I re-read Wise
Blood in the sophomore year of my undergraduate program, everything had
changed. Slowly but surely, the symbols became more apparent and the words on
the page started dancing like some of my favorite poetry. I looked around the
streets in downtown Milledgeville and suddenly saw O’Connor’s characters: a
ragged-looking lonely young man simply trying to survive without his mother, a
well-dressed older man preaching his beliefs to those who didn’t care to
listen, a scantily-clad woman, leaving passersby with questions as to her
occupation. I was here. I was in Taulkinham, Tennessee.

I was also here looking
at a barn in which a Bible salesman stole the prosthetic leg from an
intellectual woman after seducing her. I was driving down the dirt roads which
would lead me to a murderer I’d heard about in the news. I was in the woods
watching a wild turkey, I was visiting Atlanta for the first time with my
grandfather, I was working as a farmhand, I was attending the Partridge
Festival, I was drowning in the river. And I was doing all of these things
here, in Milledgeville, Georgia.There is a lot to be
said about Flannery O’Connor and her works, career, family, beliefs, disease,
and her heart. It’s a lot easier to say those things when you’re in it – when
you’re surrounded by some of the same images she was once influenced by. I know
this feeling is not unique to only me – many people have felt it before me and
I pray to Flannery’s God that I will not be the last to feel it.

Catherine Bowlin is a graduate student at Georgia College & State University and writing her Master's Thesis on O'Connor.